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Friday, July 29, 2011

What are you doing this afternoon? In just four short hours, the theme will be announced for Issue Two of Longshot magazine. Then, over the following 48-hour period, creative people from here there and everywhere will come together over the interwebs to make a magazine from start to finish. As it says on the Longshot site:

We want you to make it. We want to publish it first. We don’t want your rights."

Submissions are accepted for twenty-four hours after the theme is announced and then the next 24 hours are used to put together the magazine which is then published at noon on Sunday (PST).

Depending on the theme, I'm considering putting together a drawing to submit. Looking at the past two issues, it seems that writing is the focus and that the art is directly related to articles submitted, so I'm not exactly sure how that all works, but it sounds fun nonetheless. So writers write, photographers photograph, and illustrators illustrate — and then let's all get together and send them in to make a fab mag.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

I have something funny to tell you: Three weeks to the day that we started moving into our new home, I finally planned to cook a meal. ﻿Go to turn on the stove... nothing. That's right, it took me three full weeks to discover that our stove wasn't even plugged in. For someone who more often than not blogs about recipes, this cracks me up. Thankfully one of our best -- and most generous -- housewarming gifts was a grill and we had already planned for the main part of the meal to be cooked on that. One tip I learned is that if you have an electric kettle, you're in steamed veggie business.

In recent years I have changed my corn cooking ways from boiling a huge pot of water to boiling just and inch or so of water in a skillet to steam it. Good fresh corn grown locally really needs very little heat to release its tenderness. I prefer to eat it after the main part of the meal -- kind of like the best summer dessert ever -- and usually steam it and then place it on a platter wrapped in a clean kitchen towel until we're ready to dive in. This time, I boiled water in the electric kettle, poured it into a wide skillet, popped in the corn and let it sit with the lid on while we ate. When we pulled it from the pan it was absolutely perfect! I may just stick with this technique from here on out.

Do you have any great meal ideas that are cooked exclusively on the grill? Let me know in the comments below and I'll let you know what I come up with this week as the stove is gonna need some ruminating and fixin!